Adapted from David Grann’s history of the Osage murders, Killers of the Flower Moon was – for me at least – the cinematic event of 2023. With authoritative performances from Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and a luminous Lily Gladstone, plus the painterly cinematography of Jack Fisk and a subtly insistent final score from the late Robbie Robertson, Killers channels the spirit of the first revisionist Westerns. While perhaps lacking the flash of this year’s Oscar rivals (Oppenheimer, Poor Things), this is a masterclass in neo-classical filmmaking from Martin Scorsese – and a tough-minded reckoning with America’s brutal origins.
Ken Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty conclude their ‘Northeastern trilogy’ (preceded by I, Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You) with The Old Oak, a big-hearted tale spun from the housing crisis and the plight of refugees. With committed performances from leads Dave Turner and Ebla Mari, what might be Loach’s final feature offers a small ray of hope in an ever darkening world. While too earnest for some palates, The Old Oak is a touching footnote to Loach’s long career and peerless legacy of working-class representation on the British screen.
Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves brings us love in a hopeless place – sorry, Helsinki – thanks to its sweetly doleful leads (Alma Pöysti, Justi Vastanen) the world’s strangest karaoke bar, and what every great romance needs: a dog. With fine support from Janne Hyytiäinen and dialogue rich in deadpan wit, Fallen Leaves is a cinephile’s delight – with a generous nod to Kaurismäki’s US compadre, Jim Jarmusch.
One of the better British films in recent years, Aftersun revisits a childhood package holiday with hazy fondness. Charlotte Wells’ debut feature offers hype-worthy acting by Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio as a temporarily reunited father and daughter, and its emotional heft is underlined by a nostalgic late 90s soundtrack (Blur’s Tender is deployed to searing effect.)
Carla Simón’s dreamily poetic Alcarràs pits an unruly brood of Catalan peach farmers against their eco-capitalist overlords in a deadly battle of custom vs. birthright. Three generations unite, and fall apart as old-world certainties are grimly forsaken.
Tish Murtha, one of Britain’s greatest documentary photographers, was all but forgotten when she died in poverty. Paul Sng’s TISH retrieves the story of a woman who chronicled daily life in the North-East for the young and disenfranchised. This cautionary tale of genius crushed by indifference is a powerful rebuke to the artistic elite.
Following his 2020 debut, British filmmaker Fyzal Boulifa returns to his Moroccan roots with The Damned Don’t Cry, following a mother and son’s precarious existence as they repeatedly fall foul of contemporary Tangier’s post-colonial norms. With a title borrowed from a 1950 Joan Crawford starrer, newcomer Aicha Tebbae shines as an ageing seductress unable to protect her wayward son. The narrative mirrors Pasolini’s Mamma Roma, while Caroline Champetier’s lush, yet jagged cinematography recalls the subversive melodramas of Sirk and Fassbinder.
The British-Iranian director Babak Jalali’s fourth feature, Fremont, is set in the California town of the same name, home to an Afghan refugee (Anaita Wali Zada) working in a fortune cookie factory. Beautifully shot in black and white by Laura Valladao, Fremont owes a debt to the oddball cinema of Jarmusch et al; and as with Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, there’s love in the air – but its true theme is the search for belonging.
Co-directed by Gina Gammell and Riley Keough, War Pony was filmed on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Its loose narrative focuses on a young boy estranged from his dad, and a young man struggling to provide for his son. A warm and lively portrait of Indian lives, while not shying away from harsher realities.
It’s both predictable and bewildering that debut filmmaker Li Ruijun’s Return to Dust – a gentle hymn to rural life – is now banned in his native China. Rejected by their grasping families, a rural farm worker (Wu Renlin) and a shy, disabled woman (Hai Qing) find love and a deep, if tenuous happiness together.
And three more: Hirokazu Koreeda’s Broker, with Parasite star Kang ho Song; in Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul a French adoptee explores her native Korea; while Léonor Seraille’s Mother and Son takes a different route, as a single mother uproots from the Ivory Coast to Paris.
Among the best films I saw for the first time in 2023 are The Last Stage (1948) – the first ‘holocaust movie’ – written, directed by and starring Wanda Jakubowska, and shot in Auschwitz, where she was formerly imprisoned; and – on the big screen – Sidney Poitier’s rebellious Western, Buck and the Preacher (1972), also starring Harry Belafonte (who died, aged 95, shortly after its re-release.)
In film-related reads, I enjoyed William J. Mann’s Bogie & Bacall, a dual biography exploring one of Hollywood’s most mythologised couples; and two solid additions to the Monroe canon from Richard Barrios and Elisa Jordan. (See also: a year in review at The Marilyn Report.)
And finally, we lost two luminaries of British film recently: actress Shirley Anne Field, who broke through in The Entertainer and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and later appeared in My Beautiful Laundrette and Hear My Song; and David Leland, who wrote Alan Clarke’s seminal TV movie, Made in Britain, plus big-screen hits Mona Lisa and Personal Services; and later directed Wish You Were Here, The Big Man, and The Land Girls.